Training Lessons: Stuffing

In this post I shared about my experience with the hill of death and the "dog" that gave me the giggles. If you haven't read it, you might want to read it first to understand this. :)

So last Tuesday afternoon after we had finished school and I was sitting down to my afternoon Spark, I thought back over the morning's run. Yes, I laughed about the stuffed dog and Chad's use of the word "stuffer" instead of taxidermist.

As I made some mental notes about my run and things I would do differently next time, I kept thinking about that silly dog and it reminded me of what some of us Christians look like.

We stuff ourselves to the point we can hardly move. Stuffed full of Biblical knowledge and spiritual activity. We "DO" all the things we have been told by the church good Christians do. While those things are good they are not always the best and sometimes, they are not at all what Jesus told us to do.

Our lives are so full of activity that the Word of God does not have time to sink
into our being. It stays in our head. His Word, His Holy Word that was given as our road map, our love story, our story of redemption...hardly goes past our eyeballs into our brain. It doesn't take root deep in our beings because we are so dadgum busy that we don't have time to let it sink in.

That dog as real as it looked was a dead. (I really think it was a statue, but will not be going back down the hill to take a closer look.) It simply gave the appearance of what once was. Or perhaps better said, it was an illusion of something that was once full of life.

I'm praying that God will convict this heart the second I start to look like a stuffed and stiff Christian or worse, an illusion of a Christian. I want to look like a Christian who is LIVING the abundant life Jesus died for me to have.